Black Swan: A Darker Art

With Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler) once again climbs all the way out on a potentially fragile limb to get the movie he wants, and as with all but one of his previous films, this bold, inimitable director pulls it off. Starring Natalie Portman in an Oscar-worthy turn—she's in ­virtually every scene—as Nina, an obses­sed young classical dancer in a New York company, Black Swan is a ballet movie like no other; ­although Aronofsky's latest shares a shock ending with its ­famous 1948 ancestor, The Red Shoes, the latter seems ­almost sensible by comparison. In that film, two men vie—one professionally, the other ­personally—for Moira Shearer's beautiful red-haired ballerina, and they succeed in tearing her apart. In Black Swan, Nina does the tearing from within, which is what makes the movie so rivet­ing. But she gets a lot of help from jealous competitors; her ­demanding, retired-dancer mother; and, most of all, the alarming physical ­demands of an art form that has become anorexia central for too many young women. ­(Shearer's shapely legs look plump compared with those of ­today's fat-free ­ballerinas.) Like a lot of good but mostly older ­movies—Gone With the Wind, for one vivid example—this is a melodrama, but Aronofsky pushes the form to such crazy, inspired ­extremes that it feels risky and new. Black Swan is that rarity, a go-for-broke grand folly, and unlike the director's ­previous film, The Fountain, an extravagant, ill-fated labor of love, this one soars.

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Aronofsky's name is not among the ­writing credits for Black Swan, but it might as well be. Portman's Nina bears a distinct resem­blance to Max, the paranoid genius mathematician in Pi, Aronofsky's dizzy­ingly clever debut film; she also hallu­cinates like Ellen Burstyn's character in Requiem for a Dream (remember that menacing refrigerator?); and she's so disciplined in the service of her art that she pushes ­herself as dangerously hard as Mickey Rourke's Randy did in The Wrestler. When the movie begins, she's still spending most of her time in the corps de ballet; she longs to be a principal dancer and, especially, to dance Swan Lake. This isn't just any Swan Lake, but the darkly sexual, streamlined version created by the company's deli­ciously ruthless artistic director, Thomas Leroy (the hawk-faced French hottie ­Vincent Cassel, who hands out frissons as if they were jelly beans). Leroy has forcibly retired the role's original ballerina (a ­pungent but woefully underused Winona Ryder) and has his eye on Nina. But, he ­brutally points out in front of the whole company, while she's perfection as the exquis­ite, virginal white swan, she has yet to show that she can summon the aggres­sive seductive power of the black swan. Worse yet, he's brought in a backup from the San Francisco Ballet, the dark-haired, sensual Lily (Mila Kunis).

There is at least one frankly sexual scene in Black Swan that has earned the film an R rating from the reliably idiotic MPAA, whose members are far more comfortable with gobs of violence than a bit of fire in anyone's loins. And that's too bad, because as wildly entertaining as this movie is for an adult audience, it would speak volumes to young girls about the sexual dilemmas that, even in these allegedly liberated times, persist in bedeviling them. Nina ­herself is a sexual conundrum that neither she nor we can entirely solve. For starters, the movie fudges her age: Portman is 29 but her porcelain beauty skews young, so Nina seems 20 at most. When someone asks her if she's still a virgin and she says no, we don't believe her. She lives with her mother (a subtly scary Barbara Hershey), who treats her like a child prodigy, and her frilly, flowery bedroom telegraphs a sense of ­arrested development—so much so that when she smashes her twirling-ballerina music box and throws all her stuffed ­animals down the garbage chute, it doesn't feel like a tantrum but a declaration of ­independence. She also secretly injures herself in small ways, but Aronofsky shows us how the ballet injures her too (out of the satin toe shoes, dancers' feet are no thing of beauty). On one level, Black Swan is a girl fest with terrific dark edges: anorexia, self-­mutilation, veiled mother-daughter enmities. But it's also a richly textured fable about sex, power, desire, and danger that speaks to all women.

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